


our stories of the gentle fall

by idrilka



Series: terra incognita [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Accidental Love Confessions, Friends to Lovers, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Imprisonment, M/M, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 19:29:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8297563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idrilka/pseuds/idrilka
Summary: The Galra prison cell sees no light.
(Or: Shiro and Keith get captured. Shiro tries to hold on and keep Keith alive at all cost.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is the result of me saying on twitter that I should probably write Shiro's POV at some point and other people enabling me horribly. So thank you for making me do this; you know who you are. Also, huge thanks to radialarch, who further enabled me on several different social media and who brainstormed parts of this story with me, and to lanyon, as always, for the amazing beta. ♥  
> This story is also quite the departure for me from my usual themes, so I hope you enjoy it!  
> Title from Vienna Teng's _Gravity_.

The Galra prison cell sees no light. 

Shiro comes to consciousness in the dark, and it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to his surroundings, but once they do, he notices another shape curled up by the wall of the cell—still, unmoving. 

_Keith_. 

He’s moving towards him before he can even finish the thought, only to be yanked back when the chain strains behind his back, his arms twisting painfully. 

His head is pounding—he had no way of shielding himself from the fall when his body hit the ground. It might be a concussion, but he’s not feeling nauseated and his vision is fine, as far as he can tell in the near-complete darkness. No memory loss, either.

His mouth feels like cotton, and when he tries to swallow, he tastes bitterness on the back of his tongue. 

He has no idea how much time has passed since the two of them were taken, since they were overpowered by the Galra forces that weren’t even supposed to be there in the first place, a cruiser-class warship that appeared out of nowhere.

It was supposed to be a routine recon mission, just the two of them, in and out. 

Instead, the Galra had cut their comms before they could hail the Castle of Lions for help. As far as Shiro knows, the others have no idea what happened to them. If it’s been hours, they might still be waiting for them to return. If it’s been more than a day, they’ve probably started looking, but the only trail they would have would be their last known coordinates. They could be already light years away from that place, for all it’s worth.

He does a quick count: all his teeth are in place, and he doesn’t feel like he’s bleeding; his legs feel bruised but they’re not broken; his ribs hurt like they _are_ broken, at least one or two, cracked from the impact; his arms—

There’s a flash of panic that shoots right through him. 

He can’t feel the prosthetic arm. Slowly, he kneels down closer to the wall to take a look, a coil of dread in his stomach, cold and leaden, as he swallows thickly. He can move it just fine—the motor functions don’t appear to be impaired, and he can curl his fingers into a fist without any trouble, but he can’t feel anything. The arm is cold and dead to the touch.

Whatever they did to him to disable the arm—because of course they wouldn’t leave him in a cell with a lethal weapon permanently attached to his body—must have affected its sensory functions as a side-effect. Or maybe it wasn’t a side-effect at all. 

Keith still hasn’t moved, and there’s panic bubbling up Shiro’s throat as he slowly crawls over to him as far as the chain will allow him and reaches out, hoping that when he touches Keith, he will still be warm. 

It takes considerable effort to reach out and touch Keith, with the chain getting in the way, but he manages to get a solid grip on his arm, and then slowly, gingerly, he turns Keith over onto his back. He can’t say for sure in the dark, but he thinks Keith is still breathing. When he places the palm of his hand on Keith’s chest, he can feel the way it rises and falls. 

They’ve been both stripped of their armor, left just in the thin, fitted clothes they wear under their suits, but the inside of the cell is hot and stifling rather than cold. They don’t have to fear hypothermia. 

“Keith.” In the complete stillness and quiet of the dark cell, his rough voice sounds like a gunshot. “Come on, buddy, I need you to wake up.”

He’s afraid to shake him, because he saw Keith hit the ground, too, limp like a ragdoll, and Shiro isn’t sure if he should move him too much until he knows more about the state Keith’s in.

His hand is still touching Keith’s chest, so he feels Keith come to consciousness before he hears it—the change in his breathing, the coughing that comes after. 

“Shiro?”

He moves closer, until the chain rattles behind him. 

“I’m here. Are you okay? Anything broken?”

He watches as Keith slowly pushes himself up on his elbows, then sits up. It takes him a moment to notice the chains. 

“What the hell—”

“Don’t struggle,” Shiro tells him, shaking his head. “It’s no use. Conserve your strength.”

He watches Keith nod before he turns to look around the cell, trying to make sense of their surroundings. 

“Where are we?” he asks eventually, even though he must already know the answer. It’s just that Keith has never spent any time inside one of these, but he must recognize the Galra engineering. 

“It’s a Galra warship. I think they’re taking us back to Zarkon.” He pauses, swallowing painfully. “Keith. They have the lions.”

.

“How long do you think we’ve been here?” Keith asks, his voice raspy in the darkness. 

Shiro looks up; he’s been trying to get some shut-eye, sitting against the wall of the cell with his legs drawn up to his chest and his head resting on his knees, but the sleep wouldn’t come. It’s not a surprise. Sleep doesn’t come easily to him anymore. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “A day, maybe a little more. I can’t be sure, though.”

Nobody has been by with food, and the Galra feed their prisoners regularly, once a day. So maybe it’s been less than twenty-four hours, after all. 

He can hear the quiet clinking of the chain as Keith moves in the dark. There’s more rustling, then the sound of a body shuffling against the floor, before Keith asks, “Why do you think they left us in the same cell?”

Shiro licks his lips. He’s starting to feel dizzy from dehydration, and he hopes somebody will come by soon to bring them something to eat and, more importantly, something to drink. 

“I don’t know.” He clears his throat once, twice. It feels like there’s something jammed inside, blocking his esophagus. “It could be anything.”

He’d spent a year as their prisoner, and he still has no idea why the Galra do the things they do. The simple soldiers he can understand—even the generals and commanders, to an extent. But Zarkon, the druids— _Haggar_ —he doesn’t understand them at all. He’s not sure he wants to understand them to begin with, because they twisted him into something that has been forever tainted with their darkness and called it a feat. 

There’s more silence, punctured only by the sound of their breathing. The air inside the cell feels stale and hot, burning Shiro’s lungs when he inhales.

They should probably be planning an escape, but they won’t know anything until the door to their cell opens and the guards lead them out, giving them an opportunity to take in their surroundings and reassess the situation. They could be anywhere—Shiro would bet that on the inside, all Galra prison cells look the same. 

“Shiro,” Keith says eventually, and he sounds unsure, hesitant. “Are you…are you okay?”

Shiro knows what Keith is asking—he’d spent a year with the Galra and returned with more scars than just the visible ones on his body, and now he’s back, like the past few months never happened. 

“I don’t know,” he says again, wishing he had better answers. 

He falls quiet for a while, trying to figure out if he should say anything at all, but he doesn’t want to keep more secrets from Keith than he absolutely has to. The current count is just one. He doesn’t want to make it two. 

“They did something to my arm,” he says and hears the sudden clang of Keith’s chains as he turns towards Shiro rapidly. “They must have…I don’t know, hit some sort of switch, I guess, or do something else to disarm it. I can move it just fine, but it’s useless in a fight, and I can’t feel anything with it. And it’s cold now.”

He can hear the sharp intake of breath to his left. 

“You do realize what it means, though, right?” Keith asks. When Shiro doesn’t answer right away, he continues, “Shiro, how many Galra do you think know how to disable your arm, if it was made by the druids specifically for you? Which means that, if it’s been disarmed, we—”

Understanding dawns on him, chilling him to the bone.

“—we must be already on Zarkon’s ship.”

.

They fall asleep eventually, curled up on the ground as close to each other as possible. With the way the chains are attached to the walls, it’s hard to get too close without stretching out their arms, but they try. In the end, Shiro reaches out and closes his fingers loosely around Keith’s wrist with his left hand. He cradles the right hand to his chest, the chain digging into his ribs.

In his dreams, he’s back on the Galra command ship, and it all comes back to him in flashes of terror, the yellow eyes gleaming in the dark as the hooded figures approach, the blood on his hands as he exits the fighting pit, the metallic taste of it in his mouth. 

When he wakes up with a quiet gasp, it makes no difference. 

Beside him, Keith is still sleeping, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Their fingers got somehow tangled together while they were sleeping, and Shiro doesn’t want to wake Keith up, so he doesn’t pull his hand back. 

Keith wakes up a few seconds before the door to the cell opens and a nameless guard leaves two bowls of food and some water on the floor, almost out of reach, then closes the door without a word. 

“Come on,” Shiro says, straining to reach the food and drink, then passes one of the bowls to Keith. Even in the dark Shiro can see the revulsion in his eyes. “You need to eat and drink something. You’re no good to either of us if you’re exhausted and dehydrated.”

Reluctantly, Keith takes the bowl from Shiro and starts to eat. 

Shiro picks up his own food and, the moment the taste hits the back of his throat, he feels like he’s going to be sick. It’s the smell, too, and he barely keeps it together as he forces the meager meal down his throat, tries to keep it down. He should probably conserve the water, but he needs to get this taste out of his mouth, so he downs the entire cup and still feels the aftertaste clinging to the back of his throat. 

He wants to claw at it until his fingers come away bloody.

“Here.” Keith presses his own cup into Shiro’s hand. He’s looking at him like he’s just figured something out. “You can have some of mine.”

Shiro’s eyes widen, but then he pushes the cup back. 

“I can’t,” he says. “This is yours. You should drink, rest. I’ll be fine.”

He swallows, and swallows again, but the aftertaste doesn’t go away.

“Shiro,” Keith says, this time more forceful. In the darkness of the cell, Shiro watches him drink half the cup, then reach out again. When Keith speaks this time, his voice has gone all soft; it doesn’t happen often. “Please. Come on. Just take it.”

Shiro hesitates for a moment. 

“Please.” A pause. “I know you hate it.”

It’s an opening, a way for Shiro to admit his weakness. He takes it, along with the cup of water.

This time, he drinks in small, measured sips, swirling the water around his mouth, because it’s all they have left. He still leaves a quarter of the cup for Keith to drink and places it on the floor next to Keith’s now empty bowl. 

When Keith looks up, opening his mouth to say something, Shiro shakes his head. 

“No, it’s fine. I’m fine,” he lies. 

They’re sitting close enough that Shiro can see the way Keith closes his hands into fists, pressing them against each other with frustration. He’s always said so much with his hands—much more than he’s ever realized, but Shiro could always see it, plain as day.

“Why do you think they’re keeping us here?” Keith asks after a moment, once they’ve retreated to sit with their backs to the wall of the cell. “Zarkon doesn’t need us, he just needs the lions, and he has them. Why didn’t he just have us killed?”

Shiro knows why—or at least suspects. 

“We’re not here for Zarkon,” he says with a barely suppressed shudder. “We’re here for Haggar.”

.

It’s been coming back to him in flashes and dreams—the suppressed memories he would rather forget forever. But he remembers now, maybe not all, but most of it, and he can’t go back to the comfort of forgetting. 

They never really talked about it, after he came back, and he still has no words to explain to Keith the terror of what he’s been through. Keith doesn’t pry, though—he never has, not once, even though Shiro can see that he wants— _needs_ —to know. Sometimes Shiro thinks that he would prefer if Keith pushed the issue, the way he usually does, if he forced the words out of Shiro’s mouth somehow, through sheer force of will. Then Shiro wouldn’t have a choice.

They sleep for a while, Keith more than Shiro, who can’t help the restlessness that overtakes him and the dreams that come every time he closes his eyes for more than a few minutes at a time. 

“Shiro, you need to sleep,” Keith’s voice cuts through the darkness, low and sleep-rough. “You said it yourself, you’re not good to either of us if you’re too exhausted to function when they come for us.”

Shiro keeps silent for a moment before admitting, “I can’t sleep.”

His mind keeps going back to the memory of the lab, the table they’d strapped him to as they worked. He knows they will come for him soon—starve him out just enough to think he wouldn’t put up a fight, make him weak and dehydrated before they go back to work on him, finish what they started. 

They will never get him back to that room alive. 

When they finally come, the sound of the door opening startles both of them out of a shallow sleep, and Shiro instinctively presses his back against the wall, his muscles tensing as he squares up for a fight. Instead, the three Galra soldiers approach Keith and release the chains. He screams when they yank him to his feet, the echo of that scream forever etched into the inside of Shiro’s skull as Keith looks back at him over his shoulder, his face pale and his eyes wide. He’s kicking and screaming, a flurry of limbs and hair, as they drag him across the cell. 

It takes Shiro only a fraction of a second to get up.

“No!” he screams as soon as he realizes what’s happening, his throat tight and dry, his voice hoarse. “No, I’m the one you want! Leave him alone, you don’t want him, you want me! Take me instead!”

A figure appears in the doorway, just a dark silhouette and the gleam of a yellow eye, face hidden under the hood, but Shiro would know her anywhere. He feels like he’s going to be sick.

“So eager,” Haggar says, and in the dim light coming from the hallway, Shiro can see her smile. It makes something twist in his stomach. “Don’t worry, Champion, you’ll get your turn.”

He charges forward with a strangled scream as they drag Keith away, straining against the chains, his left wrist chafing raw under the shackles, and he can feel the moment his shoulder dislocates, right before the burning pain knocks him to his knees, his head down as he chokes on bile.

By the time he looks up, the door to the cell is closed and Keith is gone. 

Time blurs with pain after that. He has no idea how long Keith has been gone, how long he’s been kneeling on the floor with his arm hanging at an unnatural angle and limp, pulsing with pain that comes and goes in waves. 

He’s pretty sure he loses consciousness a few times, or maybe just falls asleep, but every time he comes to, the cell is still empty and silent, save for his labored breathing. After a while, he gives up the fight and folds in on himself on the floor as best he can, trying not to move the arm too much and still almost passing out for a moment when he tries to arrange himself in a more comfortable position, black spots appearing in front of his eyes as the pain erupts in his skull. His knees feel like they’re on fire, but he doesn’t dare lie down for fear of injuring himself even further.

Nobody comes to check in on him. 

When he opens his eyes again, groggy and disoriented, it’s because the door to the cell is opening and Keith is being rushed in, followed by three guards. 

He doesn’t look injured, but Shiro knows that doesn’t mean anything.

He looks up, still clutching his arm as the pain blossoms behind his eyes once again, and Keith is standing above him, looking shaken and furious at the same time.

“Are you…are you okay?” Shiro asks through clenched teeth. “What did she do to you? Keith?”

Keith just stands there for a moment, breathing heavily, the chain straining behind him. 

“What the hell did you do that for?” he hisses. 

When he finally kneels down next to Shiro, he can see how pale Keith is, his eyes a little sunken. Whatever they did to him, though, he doesn’t even seem to notice, all his attention focused on Shiro. The shoulder still throbs with a dull, pulsing pain. 

“Shiro, what the hell?” he demands. “It’s not like you could’ve prevented anything. So why did even you do that?”

Shiro doesn’t have an answer for him. The one he does have is his burden to bear.

Keith makes an aborted gesture with his hand, hovering inches away from Shiro’s injured shoulder before he pulls back, his eyes fixed on the place where the dislocated joint protrudes slightly.

“Does it hurt?” he asks in a strangled voice, and Shiro can’t help but think that he should be the one asking him this.

“Yeah.” Shiro shifts slightly on his knees. “I can’t really move it. I think it’s dislocated.”

Kneeling in front of him, Keith looks like he’s going to be sick. Slowly, he reaches out his hand and touches Shiro’s elbow, trying not to jostle the arm too much. Shiro watches as his Adam’s apple rises and falls when he swallows. 

“Do you trust me?”

Shiro nods, then breathes out through his nose. 

“I do.”

Keith nods to himself, like he’s trying to reassure himself in his decision, then looks up at Shiro, wiping his palms against the fabric of his pants. His eyes look glossy, like he’s running a mild fever. He looks nervous but trying to hide it.

“Okay, I need you to lie down on your back,” he says, then helps Shiro maneuver until he’s lying flat on the cell floor, his arm tucked against his chest, bent at the elbow. 

It’s hard, because the chains get in the way, and Keith is refusing to touch Shiro other than gingerly, betraying what his voice is trying to hide, but then he’s reaching for Shiro’s arm and placing his foot against Shiro’s ribcage for leverage, gently pulling the arm towards him. 

They both went through the basic field medicine training back at the Garrison, but practicing on a mannequin and doing it to an actual living person are two very different things. Shiro knows the basics: you keep the person in place to counter the tension, straighten out the elbow and slowly pull on the arm, stretching until the joint pops back into place. 

Keith looks like he wants to throw up.

“It’s fine,” Shiro assures him. “You’re doing fine.”

The pull feels strange, and the pain doesn’t ebb away, the shoulder now swollen and inflamed, but it’s not as excruciating as Shiro thought it would be. He can feel the pressure where Keith’s foot is pushing against his ribs as he continues to slowly pull on his arm.

“Hey, Shiro, you’re okay, right?” Keith asks. “It’s not supposed to hurt more. You need to tell me if I’m hurting you.”

Shiro licks his lips. “You’re not hurting me. It’s just strange and—” He can feel the moment the joint pops back into place, and the relief is instantaneous. “It’s in. You did it; it’s fine. I’m fine.”

He doesn’t get up at first, just lies there, looking up at the ceiling, the shoulder still throbbing with a dull ache, but at least the strange pressure has lessened now, and he can move his arm again without the pain flaring up until black spots appear in front of his eyes.

Beside him, Keith is suddenly very, very quiet. Shiro pushes himself up on his right elbow, then sits up.

“Keith?” he says and watches the way Keith’s head snaps up, his attention once again focused on Shiro. “What happened out there? Haggar— What did she do to you?”

He doesn’t know what he dreads more: that Keith tells him nothing, or that Keith tells him everything. 

What Keith says instead is, “I don’t know.” A pause. “I can’t remember.”

Shiro freezes, his muscles locking up in place. 

His memories of the time he’d spent in that lab—on that table—are a blur, but he thought it was because he couldn’t remember anything at first, or because his mind repressed those memories in an attempt to keep him sane, but now he can’t be sure. Maybe they’d been trying to make him forget, too. Maybe whatever they gave Keith, they’d given him as well until all he could remember were flashes of light and Haggar’s eyes gleaming in the dark.

“How are you feeling?”

Keith doesn’t answer at first, like he’s actually pondering the question, unsure of everything, including his own body and mind. Shiro is familiar with the sensation.

“Tired,” he says eventually. “I feel like I just pulled eight hours in the sim without a break.”

They’re quiet for a moment, before Keith asks, “Shiro, what do you think they’re doing to me?”

He sounds scared. 

Once again, Shiro wishes he had better answers—or any answers, really. As it is, he just says, “I don’t know. I don’t think— I think you’re meant not to remember. It’s what they did to me, too.”

Now that the pain in his shoulder has ebbed away a bit, he can feel the exhaustion slowly seeping in. His knees hurt, a testament to the hours he spent on his knees, and they feel raw to the touch; his thigh muscles are sore, too, the burn in them intensifying every time he moves. 

“We should sleep,” he says.

Beside him, Keith is quiet, withdrawn. There are no memories for him to relive, leaving him with just the dread of the unknown. 

Shiro knows how this feels. It doesn’t make any difference.

.

They’re woken up some time later by the guard who comes by with the food. Shiro forces his portion down his throat and washes it down with his cup of water. He’s smarter about it this time, drinking in small sips again, sloshing the water around his mouth before he swallows to get rid of the aftertaste. It’s still like eating concrete, and the meal rises in his throat against his will, burning his esophagus, but he doesn’t throw up. 

What’s more concerning now is Keith, who just picks at his food with his fingers, even though he must be exhausted and starving. It’s hard to tell in the darkness of the cell, but he looks sickly pale. 

Shiro nudges his knee, resting on the ground, with his foot. 

“Keith,” he says. “You need to eat.”

At least a few hours have passed since Keith’s return—Shiro has no idea how many, precisely, but he would bet on close to eight, maybe ten. It’s been a while since they last ate. 

Keith looks at him, then forces a handful of gruel down his throat. His chest heaves like he’s about to be sick, but he swallows it down, then coughs. 

“I’m not hungry,” he says. “You can have it if you want.”

Shiro is still starving—they’re both starving, because that’s the point, making them too weak to struggle—but he couldn’t swallow another mouthful even if he tried. He shakes his head.

“Drink your water, at least,” he says and sees Keith bristle. 

“I’m not a _child_ , Shiro,” he spits out, and it seems to take everything out of him, like this little display of anger has drained him of all strength. 

“I know you aren’t,” Shiro says calmly. “So stop acting like one and take care of yourself. You need to eat something, and you need to drink. You look exhausted.”

“I’m fine.”

He recognizes the stubborn set of Keith’s mouth, but after a moment, Keith picks up his bowl again and swallows down a few mouthfuls of the grey, sticky gruel, then washes it down with water before setting the cup down on the floor with a loud sound.

“Happy?” he asks.

Shiro just shakes his head and closes his eyes for a moment, leaning against the wall. 

“I’m going to get some shut-eye,” Keith says. 

Shiro doesn’t comment that they’ve just woken up, but watches Keith’s sleeping form all the same.

.

The next time they come for him, Shiro is wide awake, but Keith is slow to open his eyes when they open the door to the cell, even though he’s the type of person who sleeps with a knife under his pillow and wakes up at the slightest hint of change in his surroundings. 

This time, Shiro doesn’t struggle, his arm still throbbing with the ghost of yesterday’s pain, but when two of the guards reach for Keith, the third one reaches for Shiro. 

Panic rises up in his throat, and when he stops squinting against the glare coming in from the light in the corridor, he notices that the guard is holding a syringe. He jerks away, heart hammering in his chest, a scream trapped in his throat. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Haggar enter the cell and cross it in a few quick, measured strides. He finds that he can’t take his eyes off her, not even to look at Keith being taken away.

She comes closer. Shiro feels like all air has been sucked out of the room and he’s choking on nothing at all, the vacuum exploding his lungs from the inside.

“Now, now,” Haggar says, taking him by the chin and forcing him to look up at her. He doesn’t struggle, even when he can feel her long nails digging into his skin painfully. “We wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself, Champion, would we?” Her smile is like the sharp edge of a knife. “It’s all for your own good.”

She pats him on the cheek before she goes, but it feels more like a punch to the gut. 

“You know what to do,” she tells the guard.

He tries to fight him, get him to back off, to drop the syringe, but it’s inevitable. The guard pins him to the wall with a low growl and jams the syringe into Shiro’s neck, the needle tearing through the muscle, and Shiro can feel the thick, viscous fluid slowly being pushed into his veins.

Then, suddenly, he’s being uncuffed; after that, the door to the cell closes with a dull thud.

It’s a familiar type of panic that blooms in his stomach and rises up his throat, and Shiro tries to fight it just like he fought the guard a second earlier, but he can already feel himself being pulled under, the world around him looking like he’s watching though a thick, greenish glass.

His mouth feels like cotton, and there’s static in his head.

He fights to keep his eyes from closing.

When he opens them again, it takes him a moment to orient himself in his surroundings, and when he looks down, he sees the reflective surface of the lake. When he reaches out to touch it, the liquid that clings to his fingers is silvery and thick. 

Slowly, he leans down to look at his reflection, and his reflection looks back at him. The yellow eyes are staring up at him from the surface of the lake and he recoils as the Shiro in the lake smiles, baring his teeth. 

“Come to me,” he says.

“You belong to us now,” he says.

_It’s not real_ , he tells himself as two hands break the surface of the lake and reach for him, sharp claws closing around his shoulders as he’s pulled under.

_It’s not real_ , he tells himself as he opens his mouth to scream and the silver, viscous fluid fills his lungs. 

_It’s not real_ , he tells himself as he struggles and claws at his throat, his lungs burning.

_It’s not real_ , he tells himself as he slowly drowns.

They say that when you drown in your sleep, you wake up. It’s not true. When Shiro reaches the bottom of the lake, all he finds are the hands of the drowned reaching for him hungrily, the flashes of yellow eyes in the deep. 

He comes back to consciousness coughing and gasping for breath, feeling the phantom burn in his lungs. He kneels on the floor of the cell for a while, bent in half, drawing desperate, heaving breaths as he tries to calm down. 

The world around him still seems a little unfocused, but he blinks a few times, attempting to shake it off. 

For a moment, everything is quiet. He looks at his hands, but finds no claws, his fingernails clipped short and neat. He doesn’t have a mirror, but if he did, he doesn’t think he would see bright, yellow eyes staring back at him in his reflection. 

He takes deep, measured breaths, trying to convince himself that the nightmare is over. Eventually, he leans back against the wall of the cell with a heavy sigh, closing his eyes for a moment before he opens them again, afraid that if he does, he’ll fall asleep and the dreams will return. 

His head feels fuzzy and there’s ringing in his ears; he shakes his head a few times, but it persists, just like the dark mist on the peripheries of his vision. 

After a while, he hears the sounds of footsteps, and when the guards come in, Shiro’s heart leaps up to his throat, panic coiling around his ribs as he watches one of the Galra drop Keith’s limp body onto the ground. 

Shiro screams, lunging forward, and then the door closes, leaving the inside of the cell still and quiet, save for his labored breathing. 

When he comes closer, he sees that Keith’s eyes are open, staring with a blank, unseeing gaze at the ceiling. When he touches Keith, he’s cold. 

He looks smaller like this, unmoving and limp. 

Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet, then. 

It couldn’t have happened too long ago. Less than four hours. 

Shiro doesn’t notice he’s bleeding until blood starts dripping onto the floor and he realizes that his short, neatly-clipped nails broke the skin on the insides of his palms.

That’s when the panic sets in.

_He’s not dead_ , he thinks. _He’s not dead he’s not dead he’s not dead, it must be a trick, it’s a trick it’s a trick it’s a trick he’s not dead he’s not—_

He’s heaving, blood smearing on the floor of the cell as he’s trying to hold himself up, but every time he looks up, Keith’s body is still there, cold and dead, and he’s not waking up, he needs to wake up, this must be a dream, it’s a dream, nothing more, _it must be_.

In front of him, Keith is still, unmoving. 

He doesn’t know how long he spends on his knees in front of Keith’s body, shaking all over like he’s running a fever, the world in front of him blurring as time passes, until he feels like he’s drowning again, surrounded by darkness. 

The door to the cell opens again, and Shiro lifts his head. Keith’s body is gone now, and he watches as the guard pushes Keith, alive and unharmed, back into the darkness of the cell. 

Shiro looks down at his hands, expecting to see blood but finding just rough skin. 

It’s a trick. He knows it’s a trick, another figment of his imagination as his body is trying to fight whatever Haggar had him injected with, so when Keith takes a step towards him, unchained and breathing, Shiro jerks back, flinching away from the touch. 

“Shiro?” Keith looks at him with confusion, hand suspended mid-air. 

It’s a trick. 

“Shiro, come on.” Keith takes another step towards him, and Shiro moves back until his back touches the wall of the cell. He can see the moment Keith’s face changes. “Shiro, what’s wrong? What’s happening? Are you okay?”

He looks sickly and pale, his eyes sunken and dark, and Shiro wants to believe that this is real, but he knows the truth. It’s just a trick. 

He closes his eyes and breathes, thinking that maybe if he opens them again, he will wake up for real.

When he does, Keith is still there, looking at Shiro like he’s on the verge of panic as well. 

“Shiro, this is real, okay?” he says, taking another step forward. “This is real, and I’m real, and whatever you think is happening is just the drugs talking, all right?”

Keith’s hands touch the sides of Shiro’s face, and they’re warm, familiar. Shiro knows those hands, he’s held them before. The calluses on Keith’s hands—testament to the hours spent in the simulator—are the same as Shiro’s own, the pattern feels familiar. 

“Whatever those drugs made you see, it wasn’t real,” Keith says, nudging Shiro’s head to look him in the eye. “This is.”

They end up crumpled next to each other in the corner of the cell, both of them on their knees as Shiro takes deep, measured breaths and tries to convince himself that what he’s seeing this time is the real thing. 

Beside him, Keith is quiet and subdued. He doesn’t ask any questions. Shiro has no idea if he’s more disappointed or relieved.

_You were dead_ , he wants to tell Keith. _You were there, and you were dead, and I thought that I’d lost you_.

He’s lived with the dreams he tells no one about for a long time, but they have never been this vivid. He wonders if he was meant to see all that, if whatever they gave him was supposed to not only sedate him but also make him hallucinate. He doesn’t know what Haggar’s plans for him are, but he doesn’t need to know to realize that he should be afraid. That they should both be afraid. 

“How’s your arm?” Keith asks eventually, and Shiro instinctively touches the tender area on his shoulder, still inflamed and a little too warm to the touch, but much less painful now. 

“Sore,” he says. His voice sounds hoarse, and he wonders for a brief moment if he was screaming. He can’t remember. “But better, all thanks to you.”

He tries for a small smile. 

Keith just nods, curling in on himself next to the wall. The inside of the cell is hot and stifling, but he looks like he’s shaking. 

For Shiro, the fact that he has no memory of the time he’d spent in that lab—beyond the vague recollection of Haggar, as she methodically and ruthlessly turned him into whatever he is now, and the glow of her yellow eyes—means that he has no frame of reference for what is happening to Keith right now. And he knows that something is happening, as much as Keith is trying to hide it, put on a brave face and pretend like nothing is wrong. It’s a familiar mechanism for Shiro by now. 

But he also knows that it’s not starvation—they haven’t been here long enough for that—and it’s not dehydration, at least not all of it. They might be weak, but Keith had been through survival training at the Garrison, conducted in all sorts of extreme conditions, and Shiro had never seen him like that back then. 

They spend some time in silence, conserving strength. For Shiro, the fact that he’s not getting enough food is starting to become a problem—he’s noticed that ever since he came back, he needs more calories, like his body is burning through them at an accelerated rate, running hotter than it used to. But Keith is getting worse by the hour, until even his stubborn body gives up and he leans against Shiro’s side like he physically can’t keep himself upright. He hasn’t stopped shivering the entire time. 

“Keith?”

Shiro nudges him gently and Keith jerks back, bolting upright, then turns to look at him, his eyes shining sickly. 

“Sorry,” he mutters, but Shiro pulls him back against his side, the ache in his arm be damned. “I must’ve dozed off.”

“It’s fine,” Shiro says. 

A stray thought comes to the forefront of his brain, unbidden—the desire to tilt his head downward and slightly to the side, and kiss the top of Keith’s head. He thought he’d squashed all those thoughts once and for all when he came back the way he did, too changed to really consider that he could have any of his old life back.

Looks like he was wrong about that, too. 

“Come on, you need to rest,” he continues as Keith settles against his side. “You’re shaking.”

Beside him, Keith goes rigid, like he’s trying to keep himself still with whatever strength he has left. 

“I’m fine,” he says, clipped and terse. “It’s nothing.”

“ _Keith_.”

Keith jerks back again, like he’s ready to move away from Shiro.

“I told you to stop treating me like a goddamn child, Shiro,” he says, but his whole body is shaking again in more than just anger, so hard that Shiro can feel it even despite what little distance Keith has put between them. 

“I just want you to tell me when something is wrong,” Shiro says. “I’m flying blind here, Keith. You gotta help me out, okay? Starting with getting some sleep.”

He pulls Keith closer to him and wraps an arm around his shoulders, tucking Keith against his side, with his head resting against his clavicle. This close, he can feel the rapid rise and fall of Keith’s chest, can feel the moment his breathing evens out as he falls asleep.

.

They come for him again some time later, waking both of them up from where they’re curled up against each other, and two guards restrain Shiro as two other Galra soldiers take Keith away. This time, Haggar is not with them.

Shiro tries to tell them that Keith is getting sick, that he’s no use to them like that, but they don’t listen. Instead, they drag Keith out of the cell, and Keith goes without resistance, unsteady on his feet and looking back at Shiro with big, glassy eyes. In the light coming from the corridor, he looks sickly pale. 

Shiro spends the hours until Keith’s return pacing the length of the cell, taking advantage of the lack of restraints and the freedom of movement, until he tires himself out, mentally and physically. He knows his body has been gradually getting weaker and weaker, and the meager rations they’re given have been slowly pushing him over the edge of exhaustion, but it’s his mind that is a bigger problem now; it’s his mind that he can’t seem to turn off. 

He feels like he should remember, like he should start remembering now, because it’s a life and death kind of situation, and maybe if he remembers what they did to him, he’ll be able to help Keith. But the memories don’t come back, beyond the glimpses of the lab and the glimpses of Haggar’s eyes. 

It’s the fear of the unknown that gets to him the most. 

As a child, he used to think that the mysteries of the unexplored universe were fascinating. Now he knows there’s a reason people fear the possibility of what might be out there. Now he knows what they should be afraid of. 

He’s trying to make himself remember something, anything, but his mind is just full of static. He can recall only flashes, blurry and unclear, of his time in the lab. All he thinks he can feel is the phantom pain of his amputated arm. He can’t be sure, but he thinks there was nothing wrong with it when they removed it. 

The door opens at some point and Shiro expects to see Keith, but it’s just the guard with a tray of food, who leaves it on the ground without a word, just like any other day. Shiro decides to wait for Keith to come back before he eats.

When Keith does come back, Shiro’s heart leaps into his throat. He’s being dragged in by two guards, his head slumped down against his chest and his entire body limp, unmoving. 

For a moment, Shiro can’t tell if it’s real or if the nightmare is back, but then Keith groans when they deposit him on the floor. Shiro doesn’t dare move towards him until the door to their cell is closed again, but once the Galra are gone, he gets to where Keith is lying, curled in on himself, in an instant, then reaches out to touch him. 

After a moment, Keith slowly, gingerly props himself up on his elbows, then doubles over, dry-heaving violently. Shiro forces him to drink some water but forgoes the food, thinking that even if he convinced Keith to eat something, he probably wouldn’t be able to keep it down right now. 

“I’m fine,” Keith says eventually, but it’s so quiet that Shiro almost misses it. 

“Are you?” Shiro asks softly, and Keith turns to give him a look that would be heated if his eyes weren’t quite so glassy. 

The fever sets in that night. 

When Shiro is woken up from his shallow sleep, it’s because Keith is shivering all over violently, his breathing erratic and wheezing, like something is rattling inside his chest. 

After that, he deteriorates fast. 

It starts with the shivering, and at first, when Shiro reaches out to Keith, he wakes up as soon as Shiro’s palm touches his forehead, his eyes looking up at Shiro as he rolls onto his back with a quiet exhale of air that sounds almost like he’s in pain. 

He’s burning up. 

“Keith, come on,” Shiro says, reaching for the last of their water. It’s less than quarter of a cup, but it will have to do. “You need to drink. You must be dehydrated.”

Keith shakes his head stubbornly even as he sits up with difficulty, but Shiro just hands him the cup, watching as Keith takes it with a shaking hand. 

“Go on,” he says when Keith hesitates, or maybe just braces himself to keep from throwing up. “Drink.”

Keith does, visibly trying to stop himself from shaking, his muscles locking up as he fights the inevitable. There’s only so much you can do with your body—you can train it, you can develop fast reflexes and muscle memory, and turn your body into a fine-tuned instrument, but there comes a point at which all that means nothing, when faced with the most basic biological responses. 

Keith slumps back against the wall, with his knees drawn up to his chest.

“She’s been called away,” he says in a rough voice. He coughs, then licks his lips. “She told them to wait.”

It takes Shiro a moment to figure out that Keith is talking about Haggar.

“Called away for what?” Shiro asks. 

It might be their only chance; Zarkon probably couldn’t care less about them now that he has their lions, but they’re Haggar’s playthings. So to know that she’s away from the ship is invaluable. If they can get past the guards—if _he_ can get past the guards, he amends in his mind, looking at Keith—and fight their way back to their lions, then they might get out in time to find help for Keith.

“Keith, do you know where she is? Or how long she might be gone?”

Keith slowly shakes his head. His eyes are closed and he’s breathing heavily again, the horrible rattling sound in his chest echoing with each inhale. 

“You should rest,” Shiro says. “I’ll keep watch.”

_They’re not taking you again_ , he wants to say. It’s a promise he makes to himself, rather than to Keith; a reminder.

.

Watching Keith sleep is harder that he thought it would be. 

He lies on the floor folded in on himself, with his arms tucked against his chest, his hands curled into fists. Even when he finally falls asleep, his breathing doesn’t even out, and the low, wheezing sound persists throughout the night every time Keith draws a breath. His skin is burning hot to the touch.

Shiro’s throat feels tight whenever he glances to the side, looking at Keith’s sleeping form. He doesn’t look peaceful.

Being alone with your thoughts can be one of the hardest things, when your thoughts inevitably turn back to the person sleeping next to you. Shiro has been good about keeping his promise to himself, the one he made after he came back, but now, faced with Keith, sleeping fitfully just a couple feet away, all those thoughts push to the forefront of his mind, impossible to ignore. 

He wishes he could fit himself behind Keith, thinks that maybe if he could hold him, the shaking would stop. The inability to do anything is slowly driving him insane—he’s a problem-solver by nature, he thinks and he acts accordingly, and the fact that there’s nothing he can do to help is hitting him almost as hard as the sight of Keith, exhausted and feverish, and in pain. 

People at the Garrison always said that Keith had a nasty habit of getting under your skin—the reckless hotshot pilot, too abrasive to like, but too talented to ignore. When they said it, they always meant it as an insult. 

Shiro, too, had known him by reputation long before he met him in person, after he’d heard about the new kid who had just obliterated Shiro’s own record score in the simulator on the first try. He’d been more curious than anything else.

Keith didn’t make himself easy to find, at first. When Shiro finally found him, he never expected it would make such a mess of his heart. 

He’s kept a tight lid on it, for the most part, over the years they spent together at the Garrison and later, after he came back, but sometimes it still stubbornly bubbles up to the surface—the way he sometimes looks at Keith and his chest feels tight, the way he catches himself touching Keith almost absentmindedly: a hand on Keith’s shoulder, a pat on the back.

He shouldn’t, for more reasons than he’s able to articulate, but that doesn’t change the fact that his body instinctively seeks out Keith. They’re familiar with each other, know each other by touch, and they can use it in a fight, lethally efficient when they need to be, but outside of combat, there has always remained the little gap that Shiro never dared to close, despite the easy touches and both of them constantly disregarding each other’s personal space. 

Keith, for his part, has never said anything, but he’s never moved away either.

As the time passes, Shiro finds himself dozing off for a few minutes at a time, and when he wakes up from yet another short nap, he shakes his head to wake himself up and rubs the sand out of his eyes. He feels exhausted, but sleep deprivation is no stranger to him, and he had been trained to endure far more strenuous conditions. 

He rolls his head from side to side and blinks a few times, then stands up quietly to stretch his legs. 

Keith is still sleeping, but he looks restless, jerking and startling in his sleep, his hands still curled tightly into fists. 

Another hour passes—it’s hard for Shiro to tell the time at this point, after so many days spent in nothing but the relative darkness of the cell, but it couldn’t have been more than that—before Shiro’s eyes start to close again. He tries to shake it off a few times before he starts calculating: it’s been a while since the guard came with the food—eleven, maybe twelve hours; Haggar is away, and if what Keith said is true, she specifically instructed the other druids to stop whatever they were doing to Keith until her return; when the guard with the food comes back in a few hours, Shiro will wake up. He can get some shut-eye until then.

He lies down next to Keith, close enough that if anything starts happening while he’s asleep, he will hear it. He falls asleep almost instantaneously.

.

He jerks upright when the door to their cell opens and the guard puts down the tray of food. Before he can leave, Shiro bolts towards him and catches him by the arm. 

It’s a mistake.

The shock of electricity forces him to his knees, his body spasming, and when he looks up, the guard is towering over him, the taser still in his hands, at the ready.

Shiro tastes blood in his mouth.

“Please,” he says, his voice quiet and rough. He looks down, lowering his head in a show of obedience. “He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help. Please.”

The guard says nothing. 

“ _Please_ ,” Shiro tries again. “He needs help. He’s burning up.”

The guard turns around. 

“We have our orders,” he says. It’s the first time he’s ever spoken to either of them. 

Shiro’s hands clench into fists at his side.

“And are your orders to let him die?” 

The guard looks at him over his shoulder, already at the door and ready to leave. 

“What Haggar does shouldn’t concern you, _Champion_.” He spits the name out like it’s acid. The next second he’s gone. 

Shiro stays on his knees for a moment, trying to catch his breath. When he touches his ribs, they feel tender in the spot where the taser connected with his body. 

He deliberates for a moment, wondering if he should wake Keith up—he needs to eat and, even more importantly, he needs to drink. 

Slowly, he gets to his feet and brings the bowls of food and cups of water over to where Keith is still sleeping fitfully. Shiro sits down next to him, cross-legged, and reaches out to shake him by the shoulder. 

“Keith, wake up,” he says. “You need to eat.”

There’s no response beyond an unintelligible noise that escapes Keith’s mouth. A moment later, his eyes crack open, but Shiro can’t be sure if Keith sees anything when he looks at him. His eyes are glazed over and distant, like they’re looking past Shiro at whatever Keith’s fever has conjured in his mind.

“Keith.” 

Desperately, Shiro reaches for him with his prosthetic arm, fitting his fingers alongside the curve of Keith’s jaw, palm settled against the side of his neck, and he hears the shaky intake of breath and the quiet gasp just before Keith leans into the touch.

It clicks for Shiro almost instantaneously—the cold of the prosthetic must alleviate the burning sensation caused by the fever, and, judging by Keith’s reaction, the relief must be immense. Slowly, he moves the hand to touch Keith’s cheek, then his forehead. He has no sensory feedback from the arm itself for now, but he can see the way Keith’s chapped lips open slightly with a soft exhale. 

They stay like that, food forgotten, until the metal of Shiro’s prosthetic grows warm where it touches Keith’s skin and Keith himself shifts uncomfortably. Before Shiro moves away, he runs his fingers through Keith’s hair and briefly brushes his knuckles against the line of his cheekbone. 

“Keith, come on, buddy,” he says. “Work with me here. We need to get you fed and hydrated.”

Keith’s body is a dead weight in his arms as he tries to move him upright, his head lolling back limply.

“Keith,” Shiro repeats, opening his legs more to prop Keith against his own chest. “Come on, you gotta wake up.”

After a moment, Keith’s eyes flutter open again. 

“Shiro,” he says, smiling in a way that tells Shiro he’s not seeing the real him. “I knew you’d come back.”

His eyes are wide open now, but it’s clear that whatever he’s experiencing is just a hallucination. 

There’s a scream lodged somewhere inside Shiro’s throat, trying to claw its way out. If Keith dies here, in this cell, in his arms, he can’t be held responsible for what happens next. 

“I’ve been right here the whole time,” Shiro says. “Not going anywhere if I can help it, unless it’s with you.”

This is the kind of fever you die from, if you don’t get help. Untreated, whatever is causing the fever just makes you weaker and more dehydrated, and then you fade, and you die. The good news is that it doesn’t just happen overnight. The bad news is that they’re both desperately running out of time.

Keith just keeps breathing heavily for a moment. His heart, when Shiro presses his palm left of Keith’s sternum, is beating too fast and too erratically, and Shiro is afraid. He always thought, however subconsciously, that they both would be getting out of here alive. 

“You always come back for me,” he says, then licks his battered lips. “Like before you left.”

Shiro swallows, his throat painfully tight.

“You should’ve done it,” Keith says. He looks at Shiro and right past him at the same time. His voice is barely more than a whisper. “That time on the roof. I wanted you to.”

Shiro freezes. His body is still locked up in place, too stunned to move, when Keith presses his lips to the side of Shiro’s neck. It’s barely there, but it’s still undeniably a kiss. 

There was one time, right before he left for Kerberos, hours before he was scheduled to enter the pre-flight quarantine, when he almost slipped up for the first and last time, and he almost kissed Keith goodbye on the roof of the main Garrison building. He’d leaned in for a fraction of a second too long, his heart pounding in his chest, and Keith never moved away, just slightly inclined his head and closed his eyes. Shiro stopped himself before anything could happen. 

Later, he convinced himself that it was nothing, that he’d just imagined it. 

Keith never said anything, before or after. So maybe Shiro’s mind was playing tricks on him back then, too, making him see things he just wanted to see. 

It was dark out; he could’ve been wrong.

He shakes it off, turning his attention back to Keith, slumped against his chest, his chapped lips still touching Shiro’s skin. 

There are more pressing issues now. He needs to focus, needs to convince Keith to eat something and drink. 

Slowly, Shiro reaches around Keith and moves to tear off the cuff of his sleeve, then pours some water on the strip of fabric to make it wet, and presses it against the nape of Keith’s neck. 

“Wake up,” he says, his lips brushing against the shell of Keith’s ear. “Come on, Keith, I need you to wake up.”

He does, after a long, painful moment, but when he looks up at Shiro, he doesn’t seem much more lucid. It’s a start, though.

“There you are,” Shiro says, then smothers his smile against the side of Keith’s head. The relief is overwhelming. “Come on, you need to eat and drink some water. Here,” he pushes one of the bowls into Keith’s hand, “eat this.”

“I’m not hungry,” Keith says, his voice still barely more than a whisper. 

“ _Please_.”

Shiro doesn’t know what Keith reads in the desperate tone of his voice, but he swallows a mouthful of gruel, and then another. He can’t eat much, but when Shiro prompts him to drink, he empties his cup and more than half of Shiro’s, when he hands it over to Keith. 

He takes two sips himself, but decides to preserve the rest for later. 

“Thank you,” Keith says just before he falls asleep.

Shiro presses his lips together, his hands curled into fists at his sides.

“Anytime.”

.

Keith is a fighter, and so his body puts up a fight. 

Every once in a while, Shiro presses his ear to Keith’s chest to check on his heartbeat, touches the inside of his wrist to take his pulse. It’s there, erratic and thready at times, but still there. 

The door to their cell remains closed—that’s how he knows it hasn’t been a full day yet.

They make it through the night—or what Shiro imagines is the night—sleeping next to each other, back to chest, with Shiro’s prosthetic arm touching as much of Keith’s skin as possible. It works, the coolness of the metal soothing the burning sensation, while Shiro’s other hand rests on Keith’s chest, making sure that he keeps breathing. 

It takes Shiro a long time to fall asleep. In his mind, he keeps rewinding Keith’s words from earlier over and over again, hoping to find some answers, but finding only more questions instead. 

If there’s one thing he’s certain about, it’s that he knows better than to take anything Keith said at face value. He didn’t even know Shiro was there, didn’t even know where he was. It was all just a product of his feverish mind. 

It still doesn’t explain the kiss. 

There’s guilt that seizes his chest in a vise-like grip, for even entertaining the thought. It’s not the time or the place, but the memory of it plays out in his mind like a continuous loop. 

It didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t have meant anything because Keith was in no position to make it mean anything. 

That’s it—that’s the hard line here. 

Next to him, Keith exhales in a shuddery breath, his whole body seizing in a fit of coughing. Once it passes, he inhales deeply, gasping for air, before his breathing comes back to normal once again, shaky and shallow, but more or less regular. 

Slowly, Shiro finally falls asleep. 

When he wakes up, it’s because the door is opening and the guard comes by with food once again, collecting the empty bowls and cups on his way out. 

This time, Shiro doesn’t plead.

So the guard comes and goes without a word, and the door to the cell falls shut again, and Keith doesn’t wake up. 

Another day to mark off. He doesn’t know exactly how long they’ve been here, but if he had to guess, he would say eight, maybe nine days. Allura and the others must be looking for them, but he has no way of knowing if they managed to track them down, since the Galra must have turned off the tracking devices Pidge had installed in the lions, so help might be coming, but if they don’t come soon, it might be too late. 

It’s harder to wake Keith up than it was the day before, and when he does open his eyes, he stays conscious long enough for Shiro to make him drink some water and force a mouthful of food down his throat. 

Keith stops breathing some time after the guard leaves—an hour, maybe two. Shiro doesn’t notice at first, from all the way across the cell, but when he makes his way over back to where Keith is lying, curled up with his face to the wall, the stillness of him catches his attention. 

“No,” he whispers, his heart in his throat as he checks for pulse. Nothing. No heartbeat. “No, no, no, Keith, you don’t get to do this to me, come on. Come on.”

With trembling hands, he forces Keith onto his back. He feels on the verge of a panic attack, but he forces the bile down his throat and does thirty chest compressions, then tips Keith’s head back, makes sure there’s nothing in his mouth obstructing the airway. 

He can do this. 

He knows how to do this. 

He got top marks in his field medicine class. He never got to perform it on an actual, living person, but he knows how to do this.

Keith’s rib breaks on the third cycle of compressions, and Shiro can feel it give under his palms, hears the sickening crack of bone that he’ll remember for the rest of his life.

His entire upper body is shaking with exertion and shock, exhausted but still stubbornly hell-bent on keeping Keith’s blood circulating, for as long as it takes. 

He doesn’t know how long he spends there, kneeling on the ground next to Keith, loses the track of the cycles, counting only the number of compressions between the breaths. He’s sweating, and his arms are screaming in pain, the excess of lactic acid building up as he keeps going. 

Keith finally comes to consciousness, coughing and gasping for air, after what feels like hours, but Shiro realizes it couldn’t have been longer than five, maybe ten minutes. Keith doesn’t open his eyes, but his breathing goes back to normal, and Shiro collapses next to him on the ground. 

He forces the panic down his throat, back to the pit of his stomach where it’s taken permanent residence ever since Keith’s state began to deteriorate at a rapid pace and Shiro finally understood just how bad it was. His jaw is tight and aching, and he realizes he must have been gritting his teeth the entire time he was doing chest compressions. He forces it to relax, forces his muscles to loosen the tension he’s been holding in since he started.

The pained sound that escapes Keith’s mouth when he rolls to the side and disturbs the broken rib feels like a punch to the gut. 

He should’ve been more careful. He should’ve paid more attention. Keith is in a bad enough state that he doesn’t need anything more to add to his suffering. 

He knows these things happen. It doesn’t make him feel any less guilty.

.

Keith doesn’t wake up until the guard comes again, but he’s still breathing, so Shiro is counting it as a win.

“He needs medicine,” he says from his position on the ground. He makes no sudden movements. He makes no movements at all. “His heart stopped last night. He won’t make it until Haggar’s return if you leave him like that.”

In the bright light coming directly from the corridor, he can swear he sees the hint of a smile, partially hidden behind the helmet. 

“She has already returned,” the guard says.

Shiro’s stomach turns. He feels like he’s going to be sick. 

He knows they will be coming for Keith again, and soon, so he needs to plan quickly. 

He knows this:

His arm is useless in a fight, beyond any basic physical damage he can inflict with it, and he has nothing that could act as a weapon. The Galra are going to be armed. He has the layout of the station partially memorized, but he was held in a different part of it back when he was their prisoner for a year, and he has no idea how to get back to the lions. He has no idea if the lions are even still on this station. He’s also exhausted, mentally and physically, and Keith is in no state to walk, let alone fight. 

He can’t do this alone. 

What he has is a little bit of time. As it turns out, he’s wrong about that, too.

They come for Keith sooner than he anticipated, surprising him in the middle of a meal. Earlier, he managed to force some water down Keith’s throat, but he kept going in and out of consciousness, so it wasn’t much.

There are three soldiers, but no sign of Haggar. Two of them move towards Keith and pull him up by the arms, the heavy weight of him hanging between them limply as he doesn’t open his eyes. The third guard comes up to Shiro.

“Don’t try anything,” he barks out. 

There’s a long rod in his hand with a forked end, like a cattle prod. Shiro can see the crackling of electricity, the spark that promises high voltage running through his body if he so much as moves. 

Shiro stays still as they take him away. He’s no use to Keith dead, he thinks, but it feels like another broken promise.

.

He feels the impact a fraction of a second before he hears it, like an explosion going off in the distance. He can’t know for sure, but he thinks the sound originated on the outside—so it’s not just a ship malfunction or an internal explosion. 

Someone is trying to get in.

He’s on his feet as soon as he realizes what’s happening, his heart pounding. He can hear shouting just outside his cell and the sounds of heavy Galra footsteps. 

He waits in the darkness, ready to fight. If that’s who he thinks it is, maybe they still have some time left to save Keith before it’s too late.

There are muffled voices that don’t sound Galran coming from the other side of the cell door, but Shiro doesn’t make his presence known, just in case it’s not a rescue party. He can’t know for sure, and he would rather have the element of surprise. 

After a moment, the door finally opens with a slight fizz of electricity, and he sees Pidge, suited up and combat-ready, a bayard in her hand. 

He doesn’t waste any time. 

“We need to get Keith,” he says frantically. 

“Wait, you mean he’s not here? Are they keeping him in another cell?”

Shiro shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “Haggar took him. Come on, I think I remember the way.”

He looks out into the corridor, but there’s no one coming. He catches Pidge by the wrist and runs. 

Whoever is in charge of the distraction, they’re doing one hell of a job; almost all the Galra forces seem to be diverted to wherever the fight is happening, and the two of them don’t meet a lot of resistance on their way to the lab. When they do, Shiro disarms one of the soldiers and takes the gun. Pidge gives him a questioning look.

“They’ve disabled my arm,” he says. “It’s useless.”

They’re not far from the lab now. That is—if Shiro remembers the way. If it’s even the same lab. 

He takes a left, then drags Pidge into a nook in the wall, signals for her to be quiet. Three soldiers pass them on their way to join the fight. They don’t notice the two of them, tucked into a dark corner of a Galra warship. 

“Come on,” he whispers. “It’s just around the corner.”

He wasn’t wrong about the lab. It’s right there, and the familiar, half-forgotten smell hits him even through the closed door. He feels nauseated. 

The arm doesn’t work when he presses it to the biometric scanner, but Pidge has gotten pretty good at opening Galra locks, and it takes her less than thirty seconds to get inside. 

There’s no sign of Haggar when they enter, but there are two Galra soldiers standing guard. Shiro doesn’t give them a chance to react. He charges the one on the left, leaving the other one to Pidge. The guard goes down when Shiro grabs and tears off his helmet, then knocks the butt of the rifle into the side of his head. It all takes less than five seconds; he makes sure that the guard is out cold, then turns to Pidge, but she has the other guard already incapacitated and twitching in aftershocks on the floor. 

They leave the guards by the door, then venture further into the lab.

“Shiro, what did they—” Pidge starts, then stops. He can hear the almost inaudible gasp that escapes her at the sight in front of them. 

Shiro feels sick. 

There are tubes attached to Keith’s body, lying motionlessly on the table, an IV drip filled with a semi-translucent fluid. He looks barely alive. Discarded. 

Shiro crosses the length of the room in four long strides while Pidge stays behind. Maybe she’s in shock. Shiro can’t blame her. 

With shaking hands, he starts detaching the tubes, leaving the PVCs in for now. They don’t have time to do anything more. 

When Shiro checks his pulse, it’s barely there, but Keith is still breathing. That’s the most important thing. 

“Shiro, it’s fine.” He hears Pidge’s voice right beside him, and when he looks down, he discovers that she has taken over. His hands are still shaking and he hasn’t even noticed. 

“Okay, guys, we’re done here,” Pidge says into the comms. “Allura, get a healing pod ready for Keith, he’s not doing too hot. Lance, do you have the lions?” She pauses. The only thing Shiro can hear is the faint static of the comms, but no words. “Okay, we’ll meet you there.”

She gives him a determined look. 

“Okay, let’s get out of this joint,” she says. “Come on, we gotta hurry. You get Keith, I’ll cover you.”

Gently, Shiro lifts Keith off the table. He’s a heavy weight in his arms.

“Where are we going?”

Pidge hesitates. 

“Down to the hangars,” she says eventually. “Lance got Red out, but your lion is still there. We have to go get it. Lance and Hunk cleared the way for us, but it might get hot if the Galra send reinforcements.”

It’s a long way down to the hangar decks. 

“Hang in there,” he whispers to Keith, then turns back to Pidge. “Let’s go.”

.

They don’t meet any resistance until they get to the lower levels. The rifle is too big and heavy to operate one-handed; the recoil would be too much, but he doesn’t have any other options, not with his arm still out of commission. 

The Galra come at them from the back, cornering them against the hangar door. It’s all that stands between them and Shiro’s lion, but there’s no way for Pidge to bypass the security measures. 

“What do we do?” Shiro asks as the Galra close in on them. 

Pidge reaches back to a pouch attached at the belt of her suit. 

“Just stay behind me and don’t get zapped,” she says right before she tosses a shock grenade into the Galra troop. Shiro doesn’t know how high the voltage is, but it’s enough for the soldiers to drop on the spot, convulsing. Pidge turns back to the panel and gives him a small grin over the shoulder. “Okay, now let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

The relief that comes over him at the sight of Black, safe and unharmed, is almost overwhelming. 

“Pidge, where’s your lion?” Shiro asks in a moment of clarity, just as Pidge disables the cloaking device on Green. 

“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “Just get him out of here and back to the castle. We’ll cover your six.”

That’s all the encouragement he needs. Quickly, he runs across the room to where his lion is waiting, hatch already open and engines running. 

“Good girl,” he whispers as he gets in. 

He straps Keith to the emergency seat hidden in one of the walls of the pilot compartment and checks for vitals. Right now, he’s hanging in by a thread. 

“Come on, come on,” Shiro says, grabbing the controls and getting the lion off the ground as gently as he can. 

He turns on the comms, praying the connection isn’t lost. After a moment of static, he hears Allura’s voice.

“We can’t survive for much longer! Paladins, I need your status report!” Her voice is measured but insistent. “The Galra are destroying the castle’s shields!”

He clears his throat. “I’m on my way. Have a pod ready for Keith, he’s barely hanging in there.”

Another crackle of static, and then Allura says, “Shiro, don’t engage with the enemy, leave that to the other Paladins. Just bring Keith back to the castle.”

Shiro briefly looks over his shoulder as he maneuvers out of the hangar, where door has already been jammed open by Pidge. 

“Understood.”

.

There are five Galra fighters tailing him. 

Under normal circumstances, he could just outmaneuver them, but he’s afraid to jostle Keith too much—his body might not survive this. So the only thing he can do is evade them as much as he can and let Black take the rest of the heat. She’s sturdy, she can survive a lot. 

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly as the Galra land another hit that echoes through the pilot compartment. He can feel the tremor deep in his bones. 

In his mind, the lion is screaming in pain.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, quiet enough that he hopes the comms won’t pick it up. “I need to do this. It’s _him_.”

After a few seconds, the comms come alive once more.

“Don’t worry, Shiro, the cavalry has arrived!” It’s Lance, followed by the blast of multiple explosions. When Shiro looks at the control panel, there are only two enemy signatures left.

“Good work,” he says, accelerating now that there’s less debris from the partially destroyed ship floating in front of him. “I’ll see you back at the castle.”

He can see the Castle of Lions in front of him when a stray fighter spirals out of control and crashes into him from the side. Shiro wrenches the controls, avoids sending the lion into an uncontrollable spin at the last second and rights it through the sheer force of will rather than anything else. 

When he looks over at Keith, at this distance, he can’t tell if he’s still breathing.

Five thousand feet. Four thousand. Three thousand. He can see the hatch opening.

“Approaching landing,” he says into the comms. “Drop the barrier.”

He has a split second to pass through before the force of the Galra cannons rips the unprotected castle to pieces. He makes it just in time, with a fraction of a second to spare. 

“I’m in,” he announces. “Coran, meet me at the hangar deck as soon as possible.”

He drops down with little grace and releases the controls, then emerges from the lion with Keith in his arms, still and unmoving. Coran is there, and his expression changes from alarmed to panicked when he sees them. Shiro’s heart is beating frantically in his throat.

“We need to get him to a healing pod immediately,” Shiro says. He’s still clutching Keith desperately, not letting go even when Coran reaches for him. “No, it’s fine, I can carry him. Just. Let’s go.”

Beside him, Coran nods. 

“Of course,” he says. “Is he still—” 

He stops himself before he can finish.

“I don’t know.”

.

Keith is still alive when they put him in the healing pod. 

Coran offers the one to Keith’s left to Shiro, but he declines. 

“I’m fine,” he says through clenched teeth. 

Coran gives him a long, appraising look. 

“You’re no use to him here, Shiro,” he says. “At least come up to eat and shower. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure to let you know as soon as he wakes up.”

Shiro goes, dead on his feet, with one final look at Keith’s body resting in the healing pod. 

On the upper decks, the returning Paladins are slowly peeling out of their armor right there in the common area. Pidge has a nasty cut across her cheek, and Lance is bleeding from the split above his right eye, but they seem to be fine apart from that. 

The castle is already light years away from the Galra warship, light years away from Haggar and her lab.

“How is—” Hunk starts, voicing the question they all seem to be dying to ask. 

Shiro looks around the room. The concern is palpable.

“Alive,” he says. “Beyond that…I don’t know.” A pause. “I should…I should probably go shower. How long have we been gone?”

To his surprise, it’s Lance who answers, not Allura. For all his earlier bravado, he looks like he’s barely holding it together.

“It’s been almost twelve days since we lost contact.” His voice is rough. “You guys haven’t been easy to find.”

Shiro places a comforting hand on his shoulder as he leaves for his room, then turns around to face the rest of the group. 

“Thanks for bringing us home,” he says. “It’s good to be back.”

In the shower, he almost scrubs himself raw, trying to get the stale stench of the Galra prison out of his body, his hair. The clothes are beyond saving, so he just throws them on the ground, to get rid of later. 

He lathers and rinses once, twice, three times, before he starts to feel clean. He washes his hair twice, and then again, when he thinks he can still smell the sickly air of their cell on himself. Afterwards, he slumps to the ground, with the water still washing over him, getting into his eyes and mouth when he tips his face upward.

He can’t stop thinking about Keith. 

They almost lost him— _he_ almost lost him back there. The sound of Keith’s ribs breaking under too much pressure applied by Shiro’s own hands plays in a continuous loop in his head. 

His heart feels heavy in his chest, weighed down by the worry and uncertainty.

He doesn’t know how long he sits under the hot spray, but it’s long enough that his fingers and toes start to prune. Eventually, he turns the water off and reaches for the towel, then puts on loose clothes and leaves for the kitchen. He can’t bring himself to put on the undersuit and armor right now.

He expects the kitchen to be empty, but when he walks in, Pidge and Hunk are there, waiting for him with bowls of food that for once isn’t the protein scramble he’s grown accustomed to but never grown to like.

“Come on, man, dig in,” Hunk says. “I can’t even imagine what the Galra must have been feeding you, but you don’t look too great. No offence.”

“None taken,” Shiro says, taking a bite of what looks like some sort of frittata. He looks around the room as he chews. “Where’s Lance?” 

Pidge and Hunk share a look. 

“He’s down with Keith,” Pidge says eventually. 

“It really hit him hard, you know?” Hunk adds. “Losing the two of you like that.”

Shiro nods. He knows that Lance misses his family a lot, and that for him, everyone at the Castle of Lions is an extension of that family, or a different kind of family in its own right. Shiro understands that, even though Lance would never admit that in Keith’s presence. 

He doesn’t know what to say for the longest time, just keeps eating in silence. 

“He almost died,” he admits eventually. He doesn’t look up, but he still hears the two quiet intakes of breath. “He stopped breathing and I had to bring him back. I broke some of his ribs.”

Suddenly, the food tastes like ashes in his mouth. 

“You did what had to be done,” Pidge says. “No one will hold that against you, and certainly not Keith.”

“I know, I just—” He pauses, trying to compose himself. “I think I should go check up on him. Thanks for the food, guys.”

In the healing pod chamber, he finds Lance sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, staring at the tank which holds Keith suspended in a healing fluid, slowly mending whatever damage has been done to him by Haggar and the druids. 

He startles when he sees Shiro, like he didn’t expect him to come down here.

“Couldn’t keep you away, huh?” he asks with a smile that looks slightly forced. “What is it about this guy that even unconscious, he’s still the center of attention?”

It’s not a mean-spirited jab, the way it would’ve been just after they first met.

“Beats me,” Shiro says. He sits down next to Lance and leans against the wall. “Thanks for coming to get us.”

The smile falls as Lance suddenly grows serious. “Yeah. Sorry we couldn’t get to you earlier. The Galra cut the comms and cut us off completely, and it took Pidge and Hunk ages to track down your lions’ signatures. We had no idea what went wrong.” He hesitates visibly, then presses on, “So…what happened out there?”

Shiro can’t even begin to articulate all that’s going through his head, compose it into a comprehensible story with a beginning and an end, because the only thing that comes back to him over and over again is the thought that Keith almost died in that Galra cell and the echo of his breaking ribs.

“I’m not sure how to even put it in words,” he admits eventually.

Lance nods, uncharacteristically quiet.

“Yeah,” he says, climbing to his feet. “I’m gonna, you know, leave you two alone for a while. Can’t let Keith wake up and see _both_ of us here. His head is big enough as it is.”

Once Lance is gone, Shiro lets the weight on his shoulders finally come crashing down, lets himself fully feel the exhaustion he’s managed to hold at bay for so long, the guilt that has been creeping up on him for a long time and finally caught up to him in that Galra cell, taking advantage of his stripped defenses. 

When he looks up, Keith looks almost serene in the pod, and if it weren’t for the dull ache in Shiro’s shoulder, the one he dislocated and then overexerted while carrying Keith, it would almost feel like a dream.

.

Keith leaves the pod after almost twenty-four hours. 

Shiro is there with Coran when they let him out, but the others are giving him space. 

When the pod opens, Keith almost falls out, still too weak to walk, and Shiro instinctively moves to help him, wraps his arm around Keith’s waist and pulls him against his side. Keith looks up, like he’s surprised, and when their eyes meet for a second, there’s a shadow of something in his expression that disappears between one heartbeat and another. Even this close, Keith’s face is impossible to decipher.

“Come on, let’s get you to bed,” Shiro says. He doesn’t need to turn around to know that Coran is observing them. 

Keith clears his throat, then coughs. 

“It’s fine,” he says in a raspy voice. “I can walk.”

Reluctantly, Shiro lets him go. He can see the way Keith sways on his feet, so he stays nearby just in case, but it becomes clear that Keith doesn’t want Shiro touching him right now. That’s okay.

“Can I walk you back to your room at least?” he asks.

“Sure,” Keith says. Slowly, he gets dressed and then shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket, hunched in on himself. Shiro can see the way he winces when he touches his ribs. 

“Here.” Coran pushes a small jar into Keith’s hand before they go. “For the bruising. You humans are _very_ delicate, so I guess there’s nothing for us to do but wait. You should feel better in a few days.”

The walk back to Keith’s room is peaceful, the two of them falling in step almost instantly like it’s second nature to them by now. Keith doesn’t say anything, and Shiro doesn’t try to speak either. All he can do now is try to give Keith some space. He knows what being tortured does to your mind, to your body. He knows that it takes time to learn what it’s like to be a person again. 

He’s determined to give Keith all the time he needs. 

When they finally reach Keith’s quarters, the door slides easily with a low sound, and Shiro steps over the threshold right after Keith. 

“I said I’m fine,” Keith says, his back turned to Shiro, and Shiro doesn’t need to see his face to see the stubborn set of his jaw.

Keith seems to pay him no mind after that and slowly, gingerly tugs his shirt over his head, then reaches for Coran’s ointment. Shiro can’t stop staring at his ribs, covered in all shades of purple and violet, sickly green and yellow coming through in places.

Shiro feels like he’s intruding as he observes Keith trying to rub the ointment onto the bruised skin on his side, but judging by the way he winces every time he makes an abrupt movement or tries to stretch his arm too far, he must be in more pain than he’s letting on. 

Shiro crosses the room in three strides, then kneels in front of Keith and takes the jar from his hand. 

“Here, let me,” he says, reaching into the jar and scooping up some of the white, shimmery ointment. He expected it to smell horribly, but if anything, it vaguely reminds him of the scent of blackberries.

Gently, he rubs the ointment onto Keith’s skin, noting the sharp intake of breath when the palm of Shiro’s hand meets Keith’s bruised skin. It’s warm to the touch. 

“Sorry,” Shiro says. “That okay?”

Keith looks away from him, but still nods.

Shiro says nothing as he slowly, methodically works the ointment into the skin, careful not to press too hard. He wants to say that he’s sorry, but he can’t find the words, not with Keith the way he is now, so close and yet so far away he could just as well still be in the Galra prison. 

After a moment, Shiro pulls back and hands Keith his discarded t-shirt. 

“I should probably let you rest,” he says awkwardly, not quite knowing what to do with his hands. 

It’s strange, seeing Keith so distant and closed off. Shiro thought that there were no more walls left between them, but he must have been wrong. To see them back up again makes something in his chest hurt.

Eventually, he turns to leave. The door is already open when he looks over his shoulder and adds, “Keith? I’m glad you’re okay.”

This finally makes Keith look up, and he holds Shiro’s gaze for a moment before giving him a weak, barely-there smile.

.

“He’s going to be fine,” Allura assures him once he comes back to the common area after leaving Keith alone in his room. “Whatever they did to him was very…preliminary, mostly targeted his immune system. It’s a good thing you got out before they could do more damage. Right now, he needs a lot of rest, but he’s going to be fine.” She hesitates. “Physically.”

They’re all sitting on the couches around the table, and out of all of them, Allura is the only one still wearing full armor. She looks exhausted, but she doesn’t lose her composure even for a moment. She’s come a long way since they first met—they all have.

“That makes a lot of sense,” Shiro admits, “considering his symptoms.”

He still has no idea _why_ , but Haggar’s plans are never easy to see through. There must have been a purpose, however obscured. 

“You should let Pidge take a look at your arm,” Allura suggests after a moment of silence interrupted only by the quiet clang of her armor as she shifts in her seat. “Whatever the Galra did to you to disable it, there must be a way to undo it.”

To his left, Pidge grins. 

“Sweet,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to get a better look at it for ages now.” She punches him in the arm playfully. “Don’t worry, the Galra are not _that_ smart. I can totally figure it out on my own.” 

As if Shiro could ever doubt her. 

It’s moments like these that make him think of all the similarities between her and Matt, but he never voices the thought. She misses them enough already. It wouldn’t be fair to her to twist that knife.

He turns to Pidge.

“Do you want to go now, or can I get some sleep first?” he asks. 

Suddenly, he feels dead on his feet, the tension seeping out of him in a rush, like now that he knows that Keith is safe and sound, his body is giving up on him, giving in to the pressure building inside him. 

“I suggest you all try to rest for a while,” Allura says, looking around the room. “We’ve had quite an eventful day, and we should be safe here for a while, until Coran and I can get the Castle’s defenses back in working order.”

They’re drifting, then, trying to avoid giving off a signature that would show up on scanners. 

Slowly, he rises to his feet. 

“If anything happens, I’ll be in my room.”

When he walks past Keith’s quarters, he stops for a moment, listening. There is no sound coming from behind the door.

.

They’re still drifting while Pidge works on his arm. They’re down in the common area, an array of equipment spread out on the table in front of them. 

“They might be able to disable it remotely, but there must be a mechanical switch as well,” she says, feeling along the ridges of the arm where the panels connect. “Luckily for you, the Galra are a pretty paranoid bunch, so…”

Shiro follows Pidge’s movements with his eyes for a moment, then looks up, to the mass of scarred tissue where the metal connects with flesh. It’s ugly, pink and raised despite the passage of time, and as much as Shiro pays it no mind on a day-to-day basis, it’s all he can look at now. 

It’s like being back there, in that Galra prison, brought back the worst of his memories and now he can’t stop noticing things about himself that he thought he’d buried a long time ago.

“A-ha!” Pidge exclaims triumphantly after a longer moment, then presses a panel on the inside of Shiro’s upper arm. It doesn’t budge. She makes an irritated noise, then pokes at it again for good measure. “Come on, I _know_ you’re in there.”

As she runs a diagnostic scan on her laptop, Shiro’s eyes travel downward, to the mess of cables attached to the arm in various places, sending feedback to her equipment. 

“Just pry it open if you have to,” he says, observing the frustrated set of her mouth.

“Your nervous system is attached to the arm.”

Shiro looks up sharply at the sound of Keith’s voice. He’s standing in front of the table where the mess of cables and electronic equipment has been laid out, eyes zeroed in on the arm. He’s frowning.

“I know,” Shiro says. “But if it’s the only way—”

“What if that damages something?” Keith asks. He sounds angry, and Shiro has no idea why. 

“The arm is useless right now anyway,” Shiro tries to explain, ignoring the curious glances Pidge has been sneaking between the two of them. “We need to figure out how to make it work again. I don’t have a bayard to fall back on, Keith.”

Shiro doesn’t know why it feels like they’re fighting, and he has even less of an idea how to stop it. Keith, when he looks at him, is still pale and visibly exhausted, holding himself gingerly where his ribs must be still sore and bruised, but there’s a stubborn set to his mouth and a slight frown to his brow. More than anything, Shiro wants it to disappear. 

“It’s okay,” he assures Keith, hoping it will help. “I can take it.”

It seems to make Keith even more angry.

“Sure, Shiro, do whatever,” he says, turning on his heel. “You don’t need me here to watch this, so I’m going back to bed.”

After the door closes behind him with a quiet sound, Pidge looks up at Shiro but doesn’t say anything. 

“I meant what I said.” It’s Shiro who finally breaks the heavy silence. “If there’s no other way, just pry it open.”

Pidge adjusts her glasses and turns back to her screen, studying whatever feedback she’s getting with a singular focus. 

“Let me try something else first.”

Rebooting the arm turns out to be a slow and painful process even after Pidge finds a way to get to the switch without butchering the arm. Shiro’s nerve endings feel like they’re on fire, and he does his best not to let it show, gritting his teeth so hard his jaw starts to ache. 

“Are you getting any sensory feedback now?” Pidge asks, observing as the arm slowly, gradually lights up. 

Shiro nods. 

“Okay, that’s what I thought. We just gotta wait until it finishes, then. Sorry for the—” She wiggles her fingers. “You know.”

He swallows. 

“I’m fine.”

Pidge gives him a look. 

“You know who’s _not_ fine?” she says. Another pointed look. 

Shiro sighs, rubs his eyes with his left hand while doing his best to ignore the searing pain in the right one. 

“He’s been through a lot,” he says. “Give him time.”

.

Keith doesn’t avoid him, but he doesn’t seek him out either. 

They keep a routine even as the Castle drifts through space, steering clear of any planets that might remain under the Galra rule while they recover and regroup, reluctant to moor. For Shiro, this means getting up early, according to his internal clock that desperately tries to maintain his circadian rhythm, eating breakfast that usually consists of Coran’s protein scramble, and training for a few hours before lunch. 

None of the other Paladins ever spend their mornings on the training deck, leaving Shiro free to practice hand-to-hand with the gladiator. He doesn’t know if it’s coincidence or courtesy, but he appreciates the peace and quiet. For a ship this huge, the Castle of Lions can feel incredibly claustrophobic.

Three days after they return, Shiro comes into the training room to find Keith there, just sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, lost in thought. He startles when he hears Shiro approach, looking over his shoulder with surprise, like he’s forgotten this is what Shiro does in the mornings. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Shiro says as he comes closer, then sits down cross-legged next to Keith. 

It’s the first time they’ve been this close to each other since their return. Keith still looks pale, and when Shiro glances down at him, he can see the web of bluish veins in Keith’s arms, his skin almost translucent under the harsh lights of the training room. 

Shiro keeps wondering how much of what happened in that cell Keith remembers. There’s tension in his shoulders that betrays his apprehension, but Keith isn’t saying anything, and he doesn’t move away. 

“I didn’t think I’d find you here,” Shiro says. “You never come here in the morning.”

Keith just shrugs, looking away. Shiro usually knows his moods, but this is a different thing entirely. Keith can be closed off and aloof, retreating into himself in a self-preservation mechanism he’s been perfecting for years, but Shiro doesn’t think he imagines the tension in Keith’s shoulders, the inability to sit completely still, like he’s caught between the need to stay and the desire to run.

They should probably talk about what happened in that cell but, right now, Shiro can’t be sure that Keith won’t bolt the second he opens his mouth.

“How are your ribs?” he asks after a long pause instead, the guilt still eating away at him like a parasite. “I’m sorry I— It wasn’t supposed to happen. I should’ve been more careful.”

This time, Keith looks at him sharply. 

“What the hell, Shiro?” he says, his voice on the verge of cutting. “Don’t be ridiculous. You were saving my life. One broken rib is nothing, considering.”

The crack of the breaking bone and the hesitant flutter of Keith’s heart under his hands continue to haunt his dreams. Every time he falls asleep, his mind feeds him visions of Keith, dead, unseeing eyes looking up at the ceiling. 

In the seventy-four hours since their return, Shiro has taken to avoiding his bed as much as he thinks he can get away with. He’s sure the dreams will stop eventually, but for now, he makes sure to give them no further opportunities. 

“You know what, I should go,” Keith says, abruptly getting to his feet only to wince in pain when he puts too much strain on his bruised ribs. 

Shiro doesn’t understand where the anger is coming from—doesn’t understand why it seems to be aimed at him, specifically. He wants to say he’s sorry. He feels like he’s been saying he’s sorry a lot since they came back. Failing Keith back there—that’s one thing. But Shiro is fairly sure it’s not about the capture or the torture, or Shiro’s ineffectual attempts at keeping Keith alive. 

If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that torture can leave you all scrambled up inside, incapable of figuring out what it is that you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it, and maybe that’s the case with Keith—maybe he’s still figuring it out. And Shiro—Shiro was there to witness it, and if there’s one thing Keith hates, it’s to be seen as weak. He guards his soft underbelly more than anyone else Shiro has ever met, reluctant to let people in, reluctant to let them see past the façade. 

What happened in that cell, on that ship, must have shaken that part of him to the core. It’s only natural that he feels like he’s lost his footing.

Still, Shiro has no idea where they stand now, and that leaves him equally unbalanced. Their relationship has always been based on an equilibrium, the even push and pull, tidally locked like Pluto and Charon. Now that the equilibrium has been disturbed, the scales tipped over, Shiro doesn’t know how to tread so as not to upset it even further. 

Behind him, the training room door closes with a quiet hiss.

.

When Shiro enters the hangar deck, the entire room is unlit, but the second the door closes behind him, Black’s eyes light up in a quiet welcome. When Shiro focuses his mind on the lion, he can swear he can almost hear the faint purring. 

Finally, the lights come on, and when Shiro comes closer, he can see the scarring on the side of Black, where one of the Galra fighters crashed into them on their way back to the Castle. He runs his hand along the side of the lion, feeling the ridges of scratched metal under his fingers. 

“We’ll fix you up soon,” he says with a deep sigh. “You did good out there. We got him out.”

The lion doesn’t respond, but when Shiro concentrates, he can feel the contentment pushing against the boundaries of his mind. 

“I know,” Shiro says, patting one of the lion’s haunches. “I know, girl, me too.”

He’s come down to the hangar just to check the damage sustained by his lion in the fight, but now that he’s here, he’s in no rush to get back to the upper decks. It’s quiet here, save for the faint whir of the air filters that doesn’t even register consciously in his mind after months spent at the Castle of Lions, breathing nothing but recycled air, and Black’s familiar presence behind his back is comforting. A good place to think. His room feels too crowded now, too stifling—what little space there is suddenly rendered claustrophobic, reminding him faintly of the Galra cell. Here, under the high ceiling, he feels like he can breathe. 

What’s keeping his mind occupied is, unsurprisingly, Keith. It’s been four days since they came back, and Keith still resembles a shadow more than a person, keeping mostly to himself and staying at a distance. 

Shiro knows they need to confront everything that happened in that prison cell soon, before they can both talk themselves out of it and go back to pretending that nothing has changed between them, but Keith seems high-strung in a way that Shiro hasn’t seen in a long, long time. Keith can be stubborn, and he can be evasive, but he’s usually not skittish. 

Between fight and flight, Keith usually goes for the former, but with this conversation, Shiro has no idea what to expect, beyond the fact that it needs to happen, and that it needs to happen soon. 

Maybe Keith will talk. Maybe Keith will tell him to go to hell. Either way, they can’t continue like this.

.

It’s an accident when he finds Keith down on the hangar deck in the middle of the night. 

Keith doesn’t see him at first, and Shiro, once he realizes what’s going on, doesn’t let himself be seen. The scene in front of him seems like something he shouldn’t be witnessing in the first place, leaving him with a feeling like he’s intruding on something deeply private, but at the same time unable to look away. 

Usually, Keith doesn’t let himself be this vulnerable in front of other people—even in front of Shiro—yet here he is, leaning against Red and talking in a low voice, too quiet for Shiro to be able to make out any words. He doesn’t look peaceful, but he looks less on edge, like he’s starting to feel comfortable in his own skin again.

Shiro waits for a moment of pause, then clears his throat. 

Keith startles, his eyes widening when he takes in Shiro, leaning against the wall about a dozen paces away. Shiro is hoping Keith won’t bolt straight for the door. 

“Can we talk?” he asks, coming closer, until he sits down next to Keith. Behind him, Red gently nudges him with her muzzle, saying hello. 

Keith squares his shoulders, like he’s gearing himself up for a fight. 

“Sure,” he says, “let’s talk. What do you want to talk about?” 

“Keith.” Shiro shakes his head.

Next to him, Keith is stubbornly looking at the ground between his legs, knees drawn up to his chest. They’re both out of armor, and Shiro can’t help but think that Keith must be cold in just his t-shirt, his jacket folded neatly on the floor next to him. The air at the castle feels always just a few degrees too cool, and it’s even colder in the less frequently used parts of the ship, but maybe it’s just a matter of difference between human and Altean physiology, because it never seems to bother Allura and Coran.

“Can you tell me, at least, why you’re so angry with me?” Shiro asks, and this is what finally forces Keith to look up. 

“I’m not _angry_ with you,” he says, but his voice says otherwise. He keeps the distance between them, insignificant as it is.

Shiro mirrors Keith’s stance—knees drawn up, arms wrapped loosely around his knees. He can see the way Keith’s shoulders tense when he moves. 

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says quietly, because he doesn’t know what else he can say that would snap Keith out of this mood, except he’s already said sorry over and over again, and it never changed anything. 

“You know what I want, Shiro?” Keith says in a raised voice, and Shiro knows this tone. It’s been a long time since he was on the receiving end of it. “You know what I really want?” He gets to his feet, and Shiro follows, sees the way Keith subconsciously moves into a fighting stance—feet apart, shoulders squared. “For you to stop apologizing. You didn’t do anything.”

“I know. That’s why you got hurt.”

Keith just looks at him, incredulous. 

“What the fuck is your problem? You can’t save everyone! You don’t _need_ to save everyone!” He’s shouting now, hands clenched into fists at his side. “What the hell is this, Shiro, some kind of fucked up martyr complex? There was nothing you could’ve done. Nothing. So why do you keep beating yourself up about it? Don’t you have enough guilt to deal with already?”

It lands like a clean hit straight to the center of his chest. Shiro takes a step back, and then another, but he doesn’t turn to leave. Instead, he lets his shoulders drop and forces the tension out of his body, visibly deflating. He doesn’t want to fight with Keith, but if Keith forces the fight, then Shiro won’t just back off, because this confrontation needs to happen either way, if they’re supposed to live and work together after this. The worst thing about it is the feeling that he’s desperately trying to salvage a friendship. 

“I just want to understand why you can’t stand being in one room with me anymore. I just want to know what I did,” he says and watches the shock flash across Keith’s face, like he hasn’t even realized he’s been doing this. 

In a way, it’s worse. 

When Keith speaks again, he’s not shouting. Instead, his voice is quiet and subdued.

“You didn’t do anything.”

Shiro takes a tentative step forward. “Then why?”

Keith is quiet for a long moment—long enough that Shiro thinks he won’t answer—before he opens his mouth again.

“Haggar wasn’t done with you.” 

The answer makes no sense, but the dread creeping up Shiro’s spine chills him to the bone. He waits, gives Keith his time. 

“I…remembered some things after I got out of the stasis,” Keith continues after a while. “Just bits and pieces, but I think I know why— I think I know what Haggar did to me in that lab, and why.” Another pause. “I was supposed to be their test dummy. They wanted to turn you into the ultimate weapon, their _Champion_ , but they weren’t sure how much a human body can withstand, and they didn’t want to risk accidentally killing you after they’d invested so much time and effort, so they used me instead. I was expendable. You weren’t.”

Shiro feels sick. He can only look at Keith in horrified silence as guilt settles inside him like a stone in his stomach.

“It’s been _days_ ,” he says eventually, his voice strangled. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Keith’s mouth sets into a thin, displeased line. “What for? What would that change? Apart from giving you one more thing to feel guilty about.”

“Well, maybe I _should_ feel guilty,” Shiro says. He wants to reach out and touch Keith, but he doesn’t think his touch would be welcome. He can’t blame him. Now many things that happened over the past few days finally make sense. “If it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t have done all this to you.”

“Shiro, if it weren’t for you, I’d be dead.”

After a moment of silence, Keith takes a step forward, and then another, until he’s close enough to touch. Shiro keeps his hands at his sides, swallows thickly when Keith looks up at him. This close, their height difference seems to become almost insignificant, or maybe it’s just Shiro who’s not keeping his back ramrod straight for once, allowing the gravity of all the guilt and worry to weigh him down. 

“But that’s not all of it, is it?” Keith says then, with a wry smile that looks like it’s going to crumble any second now. 

It feels desperate and brash at the same time, like it’s the steely resolve and stubborn determination inside of him that are not letting him stop until he gets it all out in the open, and Keith is just powering through what’s left of this conversation through the sheer force of will.

“You don’t have to worry, Shiro. I’m not gonna do anything,” Keith continues, leaving Shiro confused for a brief moment before it hits him. “About the…you know. It’s fine.” He pauses, and Shiro can see the way his Adam’s apple rises and falls as he swallows. “It was just because of the fever; I would never have done it otherwise. I get it, okay? I get it.”

What Shiro should do is take a step back, put more distance between them, say that it’s okay and leave. But he stays rooted to the spot, watching Keith, who looks awkward and uncomfortable, and trying to ignore the way his heart is hammering against his ribs. 

Shiro is a seasoned pilot, familiar with the push and pull of the flight. He knows when it’s time to plunge into freefall, and so he does.

“I wish you’d told me. You know, before,” he says and watches Keith’s head snap back up. “And Keith? I wanted to, for what it’s worth. Back on that roof. I still do.”

Keith stills, steadying himself against Red like it takes everything in him not to collapse to the ground at the revelation. Shiro can feel the lion’s contentment pressing against his own mind—different from Black’s presence, always at the back of his head these days, and so unexpected that he almost startles and instinctively resists before allowing it to happen. Keith must be feeling it, too—the satisfaction, the reassurance radiating off the lion.

“She likes you,” Keith blurts out. He quickly looks away. 

“What about you?” Shiro asks with a small smile, ignoring the frantic beating of his heart that refuses to give up hope. 

Instead of answering, Keith closes the distance between them and presses his lips against the corner of Shiro’s mouth. They’re still rough and chapped, the kiss dry and cold, and barely there, like a ghost of that other kiss, pressed to the side of Shiro’s neck in the Galra prison cell. 

They part for a second before Shiro buries his fingers in the hair at the nape of Keith’s neck and kisses back, until the slide of lips against lips turns wet and heated; until Keith pushes him back against Red and Shiro lets him, curves one hand along the line of Keith’s jaw and pulls him even closer; until they’re just touching foreheads, breathing the same air, their lips bruised and red from kissing, Keith’s hand still clutching a fistful of fabric at the front of Shiro’s shirt. 

“Hey, you,” Shiro says quietly, running his thumb along the side of Keith’s neck, unable to keep the overwhelming tenderness out of his voice, and when Keith looks up again with the first sincere smile since his return and kisses him again, Shiro feels like he’s falling all over again, or maybe he never stopped falling to begin with.

In the end, with the taste of Keith still on his lips and his heart fluttering in his chest, it’s the easiest plunge and the gentlest fall.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want, come say hi on [tumblr](http://idrilka.tumblr.com/) :)


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